This was a key claim of the controversial Steele dossier released by BuzzFeed in January 2017 which claimed that Michael Cohen along with three colleagues attended a secret meeting with high ranking Russian officials in Prague during either the last week of August or the first week of September 2016.

The purpose of the covert meeting was allegedly to cover up evidence of corrupt links between the Trump campaign and Russian politicians involving former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and foreign policy spokesman Carter Page; and to do so at a time when both the Russians and the Trump campaign leaders privately believed that Hillary Clinton would probably win the November 2016 US presidential election.

When details of the Steele dossier first appeared in 2017, Michael Cohen angrily denied ever having been in Prague in his life, and even circulated pictures of his passport to ‘prove’ he had not been abroad in Europe at that time. Independent news sources which tried to investigate this claim further (notably the blogger and former British MP Louise Mensch) were widely denounced as conspiracy theorists, even by main-stream press writers.

According to McClatchy, the documents captured last week indicate that Michael Cohen travelled to Europe in August 2016 and slipped over the Czech border into Prague via Germany, taking advantage of the Schengen area protocols, which is why his passport has no entry/exit control stamps for the Czech Republic (exactly as postulated by independent researchers).

The significance of this information is two-fold. In the first place, if the hotly-disputed Cohen visit to Prague turns out to be true, then it raises the probability that so is everything else in the entire Steele dossier. Secondly, Cohen was known as Trump’s personal fixer for buying off embarrassing material or claims. If the Russians really did have sexual kompromat films of Trump in Moscow and St. Petersburg, then Cohen would have been aware of it, and if Michael Cohen owned copies or samples of the material, then so does Robert Mueller now.